The Bombing of Baghdad

The view from the banks of the Tigris.

The morning the first cruise missiles hit Baghdad, on March 20th, I was in a suite at the Al Rashid hotel, in a room facing south, which provided good reception for satellite phones and a panoramic view of some primary targets: the telecommunications tower; several grand domed palaces; and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the secret police. I was awake around five-thirty and heard a big, muted whoomping noise. Then my bed moved, as if there had been an earthquake rather far away. I thought I heard a high-flying jet go past, followed by anti-aircraft fire and air-raid sirens. There was more firing and, as a light-blue dawn broke, silence, except for the sound of a rooster crowing, birds singing, and a muezzin calling out “allahu akbar” over and over. Not long afterward, Paul McGeough, the correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, who was staying in the next room, received a phone message from his office saying that we had to move out of the Al Rashid because it was “a high-value target.”

There had been rumors all week that the Al Rashid would be hit, perhaps because, it was said, there was a secret Presidential bunker under it, or because a tunnel linked it to Saddam Hussein’s main palace complex across the street, or simply because it was in the way of missiles headed for the palaces or key office buildings nearby. Journalists had been hedging their bets about where to stay once the bombing started, booking rooms in several hotels and moving back and forth. The night before the missile attack, McGeough and I shared a dirty little room with two single beds in the Palestine Hotel, a run-down place that was built in the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, on the other side of the Tigris River. The Palestine was popular because it overlooks the palace complex but isn’t uncomfortably close to it. We were able to get a room when a Canadian news organization ordered its reporter to get out of the country and he gave us his keys, but we were so miserable there that we moved back to the Al Rashid, where the gardeners were still watering the lawn and clipping the shrubs, and where enough of our colleagues were staying that we felt the safety of good company, if not numbers.

I had hoped to stay in my favorite hotel in Baghdad, the Al Safeer, a small, family-run place on Abu Nawas street, on the same side of the river as the Palestine. I stashed food and water and other emergency supplies—candles, matches, batteries—there and visited several times in the days leading up to the war. The Al Safeer is near some open-air fish restaurants, which, in normal times, are brightly lit and jovial, with Middle Eastern music blaring from speakers on the walls. Many of the houses in the neighborhood are dilapidated mansions, with wrought-iron balconies and arched windows and doors. Farther down Abu Nawas from the Al Safeer there are several art galleries, a theatre, and a café where men sit outside and play dominoes. Narrow lanes run from Abu Nawas to Sadoun Street, a boulevard lined with watch shops and kebab restaurants and movie houses. The week before President Bush announced that President Hussein had forty-eight hours to get out of town, the movies running on Sadoun Street included “American Pie,” a teen-sex film, and “Inner Sanctum,” a thriller that, judging from the garish illustrations on the billboard advertising it, must be pretty gruesome.

My driver, Sabah, would often take me for a haircut and a shave on one of the back streets near the Al Safeer, at a small barbershop owned by a man named Karim, who has been cutting Sabah’s hair for thirty years. Karim served us sweet black tea, in little glass cups and saucers, from the chaikhana, the teahouse, just across the street. Sometimes, late in the evening, we would smoke apple-flavored tobacco in a nargileh—a water pipe—at another teahouse nearby, which is owned by an Egyptian who came to Iraq years ago, when it was a wealthy country and immigrant workers flooded in from all over the Middle East. Many immigrants from those days, including quite a few Sudanese, still live in the neighborhood. The streets are dirty now, with uncollected garbage and rubble lying about, but it is my favorite part of Baghdad.

The Al Fanar, another small hotel on Abu Nawas Street, right next to the Palestine and a half mile or so from the Al Safeer, was filled by a cosmopolitan group of people who had come to Baghdad to show their solidarity with the Iraqis and to protest the war. One of them, an Irish-American in his early fifties named Patrick Dillon, insisted that I accept his copy of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as a gift. Dillon is a distinctive figure. He is very pale and he always wears black clothing. His head is shaved, and there is a tattoo of the crosshairs of a rifle on the back of his skull. He told me that he came to Baghdad to make a movie inspired by “Le Petit Soldat,” Jean Luc Godard’s second film, which was made in 1960, during the last years of the Algerian war for independence from France. The narrator of Godard’s film is a deserter from the French army who works for a right-wing terrorist organization (more or less the O.A.S.), and who has come to Geneva to assassinate an important commentator for the Arab side of things. The movie is full of moral and narrative ambiguities, and has some nasty scenes of torture. Dillon said that he had served as a soldier in Vietnam and had been obsessed with war and killing ever since. He said that he had also spent time in Northern Ireland, Somalia, and Kosovo, sometimes as a filmmaker and sometimes as a relief worker. “I love death,” he said to me, enthusiastically. “I know it’s wrong, but I do. Don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Before Dillon left me his copy of “Heart of Darkness,” he read aloud the passage from which the title is derived: “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.” His voice was reverent, and he repeated the passage, then turned to me: “Doesn’t that just fucking say it all? The heart of darkness. That’s where we are, right here, right now, in fucking Baghdad.” Later, I found a note that he had left in the book for me. “I’ve been shooting my eyeballs out, the underworld of sewage streets and feral packs of night children who remind me of me,” he wrote, “and always on the verge of tears because of what Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay invented in Japan, evolved in the valleys of N. Korea and perfected in Vietnam, the firebomb, which is about to erase whatever is left of Iraqi life as it was known and lived and celebrated for what, four or five thousand years? But what’s one or two or a hundred cultures or ethnicities tossed into the dustbin of history, among friends, right? . . . I’ve moved my bed away from the balcony sliding doors and taped the great panes of glass in cross-shaped patterns but I’ll be damned if I can find any earplugs. What kind of a dump is this, hey?” I liked Dillon, but I worried about him. I saw him quite often as I drove around the streets near the Al Fanar. He would be striding purposefully along the sidewalk, and he was always alone.

The prelude to the war in Iraq attracted many eccentrics to Baghdad, among them a Russian photojournalist who wore a green paratrooper’s outfit and a tall, blond human shield named Gordon Sloan, who was famous for having participated in the Australian version of “Big Brother.” He had been filmed naked in the shower, and was subsequently known as Donkey Boy. Another human shield, Godfrey Meynell, a retired British civil servant, wept often and recited Kipling and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Korean feminists and Green Party activists mingled with more well-known visitors. Ramsey Clark, Dan Rather, Yevgeny Primakov, and Alexandra Vodjanikova, the current Miss Germany, all passed through the lobby of the Al Rashid, where the famous floor mosaic of the first George Bush had been carpeted over (because, it was said, Hans Blix did not want to be photographed stepping on it). Alexandra Vodjanikova hoped to discuss peace with Saddam Hussein, and although she did not get this opportunity, she was invited to dinner by Saddam’s priapic and psychotic elder son, Uday. It is not known how their evening went, because the next morning Miss Germany left the country with nary a word to the press corps.

A few days after Patrick Dillon gave me his copy of “Heart of Darkness,” he said that he was rereading Orwell’s “1984,” another of his favorite books. He was very excited about the imminent war, he said, and had found some wonderful subjects for his film: a group of child violinists who were learning to play Sibelius, and an Iraqi man who had returned from London, where he had been living for thirty years, and taken on the Sisyphean task of restoring a boat owned by his father. The boat had sunk in the Tigris during the bombing of Baghdad by the Americans in 1991. The man had raised it from the depths and was painstakingly working on it. “The trick to the film is to come back after the bombing, and see which of them has survived,” Dillon said. “That’s the story. Will any of us survive? Will you survive? Have you thought about that?” He laughed.

As war approached, most Iraqis I met seemed to be oddly neutral about the prospect. They were concerned about their families, but were not visibly hostile toward the West, or toward Americans. I had the impression that there was widespread, if privately held, support for regime change. I had a number of unmonitored conversations with Baghdadis, and several spoke to me with a candor that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks earlier. One day, as I was standing near the Tigris River with an Iraqi man, he said, “If God wills, Bush will bomb Saddam into the river. But not the people. Just Saddam. And Tikrit.” Tikrit is Saddam’s home town, and most of his close associates are from there. “If God wills, Tikrit will be flattened,” the man said. He spat, and called Tikritis “camels’ offspring” and a series of other pithy epithets in Arabic.

I was invited to dinner one night at the home of a senior government official, a man I will call Firas. There were a few other guests—educated, well-to-do Iraqi men who were friends of his. I told Firas that I hoped to stay in Baghdad during the war, and he said he thought that the rumors about the Al Rashid being a target were credible. He said he assumed that his ministry would be bombed, but he didn’t say that this was a terrible thing, or that the Americans were embarking on a criminal enterprise by going to war with his government.

Firas grilled Gulf shrimp on a portable charcoal grill in the kitchen, and his guests sat in the living room drinking Lebanese arrack and eating warm pistachios, cashews, and almonds. Whenever Firas joined us, he would pick up the remote control of the TV and flip channels, following the news on CNN, Iraqi state TV, and Al Jazeera. Then he got interested in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” which was playing on a satellite movie channel. He laughed delightedly at the scene where Cameron Diaz sings badly in a karaoke bar. Throughout the evening, Firas was interruptedby phone calls, including one from his boss, who wanted to talk about the eleventh-hour invitation to Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to return to Baghdad to discuss Iraq’s offer of “accelerated coöperation” on the issue of disarmament. When he got off the phone, Firas turned to me and shrugged, as if to say he knew that it was already too late to stop the war, but he had his official duties to perform. “What else can we do?” he said.

As we ate the shrimp, Firas began flipping channels again, and found another movie, “Six Days, Seven Nights,” starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche as two mismatched people who crash-land on a deserted South Sea island. The movie was subtitled in Arabic, and Firas kept the sound turned down, but it was pretty easy to follow. Ford and Heche feuded and fought and then, predictably, fell in love. Firas and his Iraqi guests were transfixed. I said that it seemed a little strange to be sitting here in Baghdad watching a Hollywood film a few days before the American attack, and they nodded vigorously and laughed, then turned back to the television set.

The day after Bush set the deadline for Saddam to leave, I visited the home of Sameer, an Iraqi violinist. Sameer and his wife and children live in a modest but comfortable house in a residential section of Baghdad. Sameer leads a chamber-music group, but he earns his living as a violin teacher at a Baghdad music school for children. He has taught three of his four childen to play instruments, and he wanted to show me what they could do. The children were excited. They squeezed together on the couch in the sitting room, whispering and fidgeting. Large wooden bureaus had been placed in front of the windows, and the furniture was covered with drop cloths. Sameer went first. He stood in front of a music stand and played a sweet, mournful étude. Then Hamid, his ten-year-old son, played his own little violin while his father stood next to him, gently directing him with his hand. One of Sameer’s daughters played a piece for flute, and his eldest child, a twelve-year-old girl, played the piano. Sameer apologized about the piano being out of tune. He said that the violin strings were not in the best shape, either. They were second-rate strings from Turkey and China. “It’s impossible to get professional violin strings in Baghdad,” he said sadly.

During the family concert, Sameer’s wife, a pretty woman with deep-blue eyes, had stayed in the kitchen, and I went in to say hello. She was sitting at a table making small face masks with a needle and thread. She put cotton balls and charcoal inside a gauze pouch that would cover the mouth and nose, and little loops of cloth to fasten the masks around the ears. I asked her what they were for, and she smiled shyly. “They are masks, for the smoke, for the children,” she said. I asked her if the children knew what was about to happen. She shook her head. “No, they don’t, really. They just know there will be a lot of noise and smoke.” The children had come into the room and were standing around, smiling and staring timidly at me.

Later, in the bunkerlike front room and out of earshot of the children, I asked Sameer what his plans were. He wanted to take his family out before the bombing began, to Jordan, he said. He had the right papers to leave, but he had so far been unable to get enough gas for the journey. He didn’t know yet if he would manage it in time; there were huge lines at all the gas stations in town. But he was going to try. He nodded toward his children. “I don’t want them to go through this,” he said. I asked if he needed any help. He looked embarrassed and shook his head, thanking me for the offer. When I drove away, the whole family was standing outside, and the children were smiling and waving.

Iraqis who had homes in the countryside or relatives in villages outside of Baghdad were fleeing the city. An Iraqi friend of mine who lives in a Shia neighborhood in the western suburbs was staying, but he told me that his three closest neighbors had locked up their houses and gone to Karbala, two hours to the south. They had asked him to look after their houses while they were away. Western journalists also began evacuating, leaving in a succession of convoys of GMC Suburbans headed for the Jordanian border. The normal fare for the ten-hour journey to Amman, two hundred dollars, had leaped to five hundred by noon of the day after Bush’s speech. By that afternoon, it was seven hundred. Most of the reporters had been ordered out of the country by their news organizations, following Colin Powell’s warning that all Westerners in Iraq were at risk. Some people had become nervous after receiving warnings from Iraqi Information Ministry officials that they could not guarantee their safety—a possible allusion to their being taken hostage by Saddam’s intelligence services.

The last diplomats and U.N. inspectors in Baghdad were expected to leave the next morning, and the atmosphere in the hotels and at the Information Ministry became increasingly tense. Journalists had to pay their bills before they left the country. Fees to the government usually amounted to two hundred dollars plus fifty thousand Iraqi dinars—equivalent to another twenty dollars—per day. One American television network left behind three huge flour sacks full of dinars at the cashier’s desk at the Al Rashid, a hotel employee told me in an awed voice. Until recently, the largest Iraqi notes in circulation were two-hundred-and-fifty-dinar notes, worth about ten cents; a few weeks ago, mercifully, ten-thousand-dinar notes began appearing. Paying off the press center was an immensely frustrating process that sometimes took several hours. There was a single cashier there, who was required to note the serial number of each U.S. bill. Once that tedious procedure was over, various officials had to be found to sign off on things.

The Al Rashid began emptying out. The day before, thinking of moving myself, I had revisited the Al Safeer to see how I felt about being there, and realized that it was probably not a good option after all. There were virtually no other journalists staying there, and I could easily be isolated and cut off from information when the war began. It was a moot point anyway, I discovered, as the managers let it be known that they had been told not to rent rooms to journalists. On Tuesday morning, Paul Mcgeough and I moved to the Palestine, and back to the Rashid the next day. By then, Baghdad had become an eerie place. There were few civilians on the streets, and most of the shops were shuttered, their windows taped with large X’s. The traffic on the roads had thinned out considerably, and quite a few vehicles were filled with men in uniform, going here and there in a hurry. Policemen wearing old-fashioned helmets stood at intersections with their weapons, and throughout the city knots of militiamen and soldiers had assembled on street corners. Most of the foxholes and sandbagged dugouts that had begun appearing throughout the capital in the past four or five days, and had sat empty, were now manned by men with guns.

By Wednesday afternoon, there were few foreigners remaining in Iraq. The night before, the price of a car journey to Amman had reached thirteen hundred dollars, and reports had begun to filter back about journalists—mostly Americans and British, but also some Spaniards and at least one Norwegian relief worker—who had run into problems with the authorities while trying to leave the country. Most, it seemed, had been strip-searched, and detained on previously unenforced currency violations. Either they had been brought back to Baghdad or, depending on the rumors one heard, they were being held in detention in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

The prospect of being stuck in an Iraqi jail during an American bombing campaign seemed to rule out the option of leaving, and by late afternoon on Wednesday the lobby of the Al Rashid, which had had a funereal appearance just twenty-four hours before, when all the journalists headed over to the unpleasant Palestine, was once again thrumming with activity. At around 5 p.m., the men who run the Internet Center on the ground floor informed their customers that they would be closing earlier than usual, in two hours’ time. As customers finished at the computers, the men turned them off, unplugged them, and began packing them away into cardboard boxes. Out in the lobby, I noticed that all the floor-to-ceiling windows that look onto the garden had been taped, and in the outer foyer, opposite the kilim shop, the windows were not only taped but covered with beautifully woven rugs. It felt as though you were walking through a luxurious Bedouin tent.

I went for a drive at dusk, through almost empty streets. Here and there, families were loading refrigerators, butane cannisters, and other belongings onto small flatbed trucks. While we were stopped at a traffic light, a man in the car next to us, a rustic-looking character in a red-and-white checked kaffiyeh head scarf, pointed a Kalashnikov out the window and began loading the clip. I heard a metallic-sounding click, and the man put the gun away as the light changed. People were stopping their cars to buy items from men and women who stood beside stands with little mounds of stacked-up wares—kerosene lamps, cans of infant formula, instant coffee, luncheon meat, jugs of soybean oil with the logo of the World Food Programme. Two young men at one of the stands looked at me in surprise and pointed at the sky. One of them asked in broken English if I was staying in Iraq for the war. I shrugged and nodded, and he smiled and said that he hoped I didn’t get killed. We shook hands. I told him that I hoped he didn’t get killed, either.

After the “decapitation” strike against Saddam early on Thursday morning, Paul McGeough and I moved back to the Palestine for good. The lobby was swarming with secret police, journalists, and some pretty eccentric-looking human shields, including one with long dreadlocks and pierced ears who wore black Kurdish pantaloons with a saggy rear end. In a new traffic island behind the hotel, next to a big statue of Saddam, one of the Korean feminist groups had hung a banner protesting sexual abuse.

The second strike came on Thursday evening, and when I looked out my window I noticed that several Iraqis were sitting on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to a small hotel nearby, as if nothing much were happening and they were just enjoying the fresh evening air. There were three big hits quite close to us, but across the river, and we watched the fires from our balcony. We could see a few cars driving around, even over the bridges. Dogs barked, and the river looked as calm as olive oil, with just a shimmer of motion on the surface.

The next morning, I visited the home of a highly placed Iraqi professional, a man I will call Mr. Hassan, who began reminiscing about the sixties, when many Iraqis of his generation went to England and the United States to study. He had been a student at a provincial English university. It was one of the best times of his life, he said. Something had happened then, a simple thing, that was one of his most enduring memories, and he had been thinking of it that morning. He had travelled to London one day, to the Iraqi Embassy in Queen’s Gate, to get a paper signed. “There was a porter who worked there, a man who had been at the Embassy forever,” Mr. Hassan said. “He was a big, tall fellow, and English, but he had lived in Iraq and had been with the Embassy so long that he seemed completely Iraqi. I told him who I wanted to see and he told me to sit down and wait. After a long time, more than an hour and a half, I asked him why it was taking so long. He said that the person I was waiting for had gone out and that I should come back the next day. This made me very angry, of course. I had waited two hours, I said. The porter looked at his watch and told me I was lying. I had waited only an hour and a half.

“There was no point in arguing with the man,” Mr. Hassan said. “But I was so furious that I told him I wouldn’t leave. The porter stared at me for a moment and took a painting of the then President of Iraq, Abdul Salam Arif, down from the wall and brought it over to me. The frame was very loosely attached. He shoved the painting under my nose. ‘Look,’ he said, and he lifted the portrait up. Underneath was the picture of the President’s predecessor, Abdul Karim Qasim. And there were other layers of portraits. I think the last one he showed me was of King Faisal.” Mr. Hassan is something of a philosopher. “I think the porter was trying to tell me that Iraq’s leaders came and went and it didn’t matter to him, because he was always there. And as for me, I was of no consequence at all.” Mr. Hassan smiled and arched his eyebrows.

That night, the “shock and awe” bombardment began. The first bombs hit precisely at nine o’clock, and we had a front-row view of the conflagration. There were huge blasts, simultaneous concussions with aftershocks that knocked us back. I forgot to put my earplugs in. The Republican Palace and a huge, ugly, pyramid-shaped building some ten stories high were hit several times and burned robustly. Fireballs were followed by white flashes that lit up the sky. Debris flew through the air from a couple of the blasts as buildings took direct hits. What must have been a cruise missile smashed into the roof of the Council of Ministers, and a huge orange plume of flame rose up. A big white dog loped down the center of Abu Nawas Street, followed, some minutes later, by a man on a bicycle, pedalling along in no apparent hurry. I heard a donkey bray. The night sky, which was a deep blue, was filled with columns of black and gray smoke. The Al Rashid was still standing. ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.